Poetry on Poverty

At the heart of LAUP is more than just helping students gain God's heart for the poor.  It also involves identifying the competing values already embedded within them through our culture.  We are helping students make choices out of a view of the world that's driven by the "survival of the fittest" to make space for a view of the world built on the principles of the Kingdom of God.

Sam Rickert working on poetry at the LAUP house

Last Thursday, at our first weekly LAUP gathering, one of the students from our artist team--Sam Rickert--shared a spoken-word poetry piece that captured the foundation that we've laid.  Reading it doesn't do it justice, but you'll still get the idea:

Americans fight hard for freedom, for individualism...let's look at where that's left us.

We love our individual independence, not realizing the isolation conseqence;

We hope to be a self-made man, which probably means a wealth-made man.

This business world lives on competition, so we push the weak down without condition;

We live with a sense of entitlement, though you won't find that in God's covenant.

Most Americans believe "God helps those who help themselves" is biblical, just shows our starvation of the scriptural.

See entitlement leads to love-malnutrition, with western churches dying as the fruition.

The American Dream promises opportunity, but often leads to egocentricity;

We are told "fake it till you make it", God says, "I'll take your mask and break it."

Basically this rhyme's about

not I but we,

about us not me; 

We must live in unity

if we will ever be a kingdom community,

and a generation with eyes to see

the sins of our culture.

Let renewal rain down

by our repentance give God his crown.

As you pray for us, please ask God to move powerfully in the short time we have with the LAUP students.  As our directors team has sought God, we have felt moved by God to recognize the urgency of what's happening in them:  though they have the rest of their lives to live, what happens in their hearts over this next month has a dramatic effect upon the trajectory of the rest of their lives.